And boy has phone technology leapt ahead and two years. Anywise, the consensus from the intertubes appears to be that my old Galaxy S3 is dead on account of some variety of hardware fault, and is probably unrecoverable. As such, here is the short list of possible replacements so far:

A few clarifications…

“Pure” indicates whether or not the Android operating system is left unmolested by manufacturers or carriers trying to do […]

If your phone has the ability to blacklist numbers (and, thankfully, CyanogenMod does), I would go ahead and blacklist the 1.268.762.**** area code and prefix. In fact, unless you have family, friends, or other people in Antigua and Barbuda who would otherwise be calling you, I would recommend simply blacklisting the entire 1.268.* area code. It turns out jackasses from that area code are doing some kind of “one-ring scam”, and calling them back – […]

Cyanogemod 10.0.0 for Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones (and specifically the T, commonly found on the T-Mobile networks) does not support Picasa synchronization through the Gallery app. Your Google+ app will still happily upload your pictures to your Google Drive online storage space (though that space is now limited if you upload full-resolution pictures), you simply will not be able to see any pictures stored on the “cloud” from your ph.

As some folks have been informing me, and as I have noticed myself, this site looks all manner of horrific on some Android phones. This is a known issue with WPTouch, and according to a tweet I received from them, the folks behind the plugin are working on fixing it. The bug does not appear to be bound to user agents, but rather the version of the Android operating system used by the phone – […]

So Better Half and I are looking into possibly changing our cell phone service provider, as well as upgrading our phones. The former is actually the easy part these days… the latter is a bit more complicated.

Since we are looking at pre-paid plans, we generally cannot get subsidized phones, which leaves us with the “unlocked” phone market. Amazon carries more than a few of those, of course, but you will end up paying […]

Better Half and I got our current smartphones (HTC Incredibles) over three years ago now, and are still cruising along on a month-to-month plan with Verizon. Why? We actually got one of their "unlimited everything" plans, and as long as we do not touch it, we get to keep it (Verizon no longer offers unlimited data). However, the honest truth is that I have never […]

Lord knows I do not need any further distractions in my life, but in case you do, the ad-free version of Angry Birds is Amazon’s App of the Day today, which means "free". Given that it seems the newer levels are specifically designed to put the ads in the way of your seeing what is going on, I went ahead and snagged a copy myself.

(Though, I swear to God, I am completely blaming Ridley Scott if society never manages to accept the notion of human-like androids; that man has single-handedly done more damage to that cause than Isaac Asimov ever could have dreamed of…)

Smartphones are constantly getting better at imitating compact cameras, but so far we haven’t seen many cameras that attempt to mimic smartphones. That changes today with the Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera, a 16-megapixel compact camera unveiled at CES. It’s a point-and-shoot camera that’s pretty much a smartphone without the phone. Powered by Android, the camera features a 3x (36-108mmm) optical zoom lens, a […]

Since the recent WordPress 3.3 “Update” has broken not only its interactions with Windows Live Writer but also the Android WordPress app and the onboard WordPress Jetpack plugin, in the place of any meaningful post that I would have written in the time I wasted trying to troubleshoot and correct someone else’s poor code, I give you some appropriately seasonal videos, courtesy of my parents:

Do you use an HTC Incredible on Verizon? Been letting it automatically update? Do yourself a favor, click Menu -> Settings -> About Phone -> Software Information, and take a look at the "Android version" and "Software number" – if the former is showing "2.3.4" and the latter is showing you anything lower than 4.08.605.2, and, specifically, 4.06.###.#, your phone is "broken" (by some definition of the word), and needs to be fixed.

Ever since getting my Android phone, I have complained about the lack of shot timers for that particular platform.

Imagine my surprise today when I should stumble across not one, not two, but three separate, free shot timer applications, in addition to one pay-to-play (which gets rather cruddy reviews). I have not had the chance to fool around with them very much (apart from realizing that their starting “beep” is not terribly loud, which […]

Is there any way to get blockquotes to show up properly inside of the Android version of Google Reader? Because the standard [blockquote] tag does not appear to provide any formatting at all when reading feeds on my phone, and I have walked away from posts thoroughly confused more than a few times now…

Just to show you how far our world has come, you can now file your taxes from your phone, complete with that little gadget being able to read your W-2 form by itself, and input all of the pertinent information.

You will not catch me using such an insecure device to file my federally-mandated-through-threat-of-force tithe, but… damn.

So after about two weeks of fooling around with our Android-based phones, I have to admit these little things are pretty slick… but you probably already knew that, and I am not really here to write about the phone today. Instead, we are going to talk about apps, because if there is one thing I love, it is modularity. Oh, and the best part of all these apps? Yeah, they are free.